


The Human Issue

by Nikw0lf



Series: Myth of Stars [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Aliens, Alternate Universe - Mythology, F/F, F/M, Multi, Original Fiction, Science Fiction, sci fi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:02:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24016396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nikw0lf/pseuds/Nikw0lf
Summary: Humanity's 'first contact' with the aliens they've known all along.
Series: Myth of Stars [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1732279
Kudos: 1





	1. Amelia's Angels

**Author's Note:**

> I'm transferring this from a word document, so let me know if you see anything funky format-wise. I'm still very inexperienced at posting here haha.

Five people emerged from the small pod in a single file line, fanning out as they all took in the scenery in front of them. Here, the forest thinned to a few solitary trees, then gave way to gently sloping fields of golden wheat that swayed languidly in the wind, mimicking the flow of an ocean, if the oceans were made of molten gold. The sun was just setting in the west, filtering through the point where the trees stopped and the field started far to the team’s left. It was quiet, apart from the chirp of crickets in the underbrush and a few birds bidding the sun farewell. 

The last individual out of the pod, noticeably shorter than the rest, pointed a remote of sorts at the pod and clicked a button. The light around the pod shifted and twisted until it seemed a large rock sat there in the woods instead. The straggler then turned his attention to the same fields his companions were viewing. 

“Its really flat here, huh?” He muttered, crossing his arms. A few of the others scowled at him, but the man standing in the middle chuckled, seemingly unwilling to let the youngster’s crude expression of bewilderment ruin his enjoyment of the sunset in front of him. 

Three members of the team instantly drew their weapons as the grass in front of them rustled, then paused again for a moment, before a small girl popped out, overalls dusty and a small brown terrier at her heel. The dog growled at the newcomers for a moment, and the man in the middle of the line motioned his hands down at his crewmates. They obeyed, putting their weapons away again, albeit reluctantly. 

The girl’s eyes flitted over the line of strangers, taking in their stature – a few inches shorter than the average human – and their fluffy, almost impossibly huge feathered wings sprouting from their backs. She paused for longer on the tall woman standing next to the middle, her wings more fleshy and bare. A couple of the crew members narrowed their eyes at this, the girl’s hesitance seeming to reinforce in their minds the woman’s status as an outsider. But the girl simply finished her observation, then took a few more hesitant steps forward. 

The man in the middle adjusted a small device on the collar of his shirt, opening his mouth to speak before the bat-winged women cut in. 

“Captain, the treaty-”

“Its ok, lieutenant,” he said with a smile “she’s just a child, no one will take her recollections seriously yet.” At that, he crouched down, beckoning the little girl forward.

“Hey there,” he said softly, as she tottered forward the rest of the way to him, the dog following her still and now sharing her curiosity, quietly sniffing at the captain and his crew. The girl reached her hand up towards the captain’s golden-brown wings, and he lowered one towards her, letting her feel the sleek feathers and soft down. 

“Are you an angel, mister?” She blurted out, hazel eyes wide and incredulous. 

He let out a hearty chuckle. “Not quite.” His lieutenant crouched down next to him now, and the child shifted over towards her now. One bare wing extended forward, following the captain’s lead, as the child reached up to touch that wonder as well. The tall woman seemed uncertain, but her eyes softened as she watched the little girl.

“What’s your name, little one?” The woman asked. 

“Amelia!” She exclaimed proudly. “Who are you?” 

“I’m Lillian,” the woman replied. 

They were interrupted by excited yipping to the right. The youngest crewmember was playing with the terrier now, throwing a stick for the little dog to fetch. 

“Captain, can we keep them?” He asked with a broad grin. 

“No, cadet, I’m sure they’re quite happy with their family here.” As if on cue, they heard a woman’s voice in the distance. 

“Amelia! Pip! Where did you two run off to this time?” The little girl turned around towards the source of the noise, and the little dog perked his ears up and looked to his girl.

“Go on back to your mother now. It was nice to meet you, Amelia” the captain said to her. She turned back towards them, seeming hesitant to leave. 

“Will you come back one day?” She asked, her wide eyes looking imploringly to the lieutenant and then the captain. The two adults exchanged a glance. 

“One day, yes, I think some of us shall,” the captain responded, giving the girl a pat on the head. She grinned widely, then spun around with a wave goodbye and ran back to her mother with the little dog sprinting at her heels once more. 

The captain straightened up, flexing his wings up and out so they caught and glimmered in the light, and the lieutenant followed suit once more. He turned around to head back to the pod, and the rest of the crew followed. 

“Can you really say that, captain? We can’t know that we will be allowed back here anytime soon, much less be making any contact with humans.” Lilian’s voice was laced with concern at what she perceived as a lie to the little girl. The captain just gave her a fond smile and shook his head. 

“I have a feeling we will be back here sooner than you expect, Lillian.”


	2. Not Alone in the Woods

The evening had started off normally enough. Jack had gone to hang out with his friends, like he did every Friday night, and they were all playing Mario Kart. Someone ordered pizza, and they’d all eaten to contentment, and he’d felt relaxed. He could convince himself he belonged. 

Then, Jillian had showed up with three bottles of liquor, as per usual. Everyone else was excited. The bottles drained lower as the banter got louder. He’d tried a few shots himself to try and see if it drowned out the noise at all. It didn’t.

Mario Kart had resumed, but now everyone was really yelling. Jillian lost a race by a lot, and stood up to start an argument with anyone else who would engage. Then it was too much. Jack felt like his head was going to explode. So he slipped out the back door, quietly enough that no one else noticed, and headed off to the woods next to his dorm. 

Calling it just a woods wasn’t entirely accurate. The ground squelched under his feet as he stumbled between bushes, still walking, still trying to get away. Maybe ten or twenty years ago, it had been a proper marsh, but now it was just mushy soil with an even mixture of cypress trees and younger pines. None of that really mattered, though. What mattered was that Jack couldn’t just enjoy a Friday night with friends like a normal person. He was too easily overwhelmed, too easily forgotten, too-

“S**t!” He’d stumbled over another cypress knee only to find he’d caught himself on something rough and scaled, and now he was face to face with some sort of lizard-person or snake-person or-

“Get offfff me!” The snake-person shoved Jack away with two also-humanoid-but-scaled arms, and he fell back into a tree trunk. Now the two stared at each other, each too stunned to think about fleeing or fighting. 

“You- you’re one of those lizard-people!” Jack exclaimed. The other being gave him a stare that Jack somehow understood as confusion. “Like, you know, the reptilians that control the government or whatever!”

The snake-person let out a raspy sigh. 

“Thissss again?” Jack stayed quiet, so they continued. “I’m not controlling your sssstupid government. Even I couldn’t fffffix that messssss.” 

Jack gaped at them, then shut his mouth and shook his head. “You can say that again.”

“What’sssss a kid like you doing out here? Aren’t you all sssssupposed to be at your little gatheringsssss thisssss late at night? Sssso ssssocial. Ssssso loud. Tch.” The snake-person shook their head. Jack finally let himself glance away from this stranger, around the woods, and he ascertained that they were also alone, no other reptiles, no life at all apart from crickets chirping in the underbrush. 

“I was just getting some fresh air. Thinking.” Jack squinted at them. Why was he even standing here talking to this being like this whole situation was normal or something? Had his shots been laced with something? Was he hallucinating? Whatever, it didn’t really matter now. 

“You’re alone too, though,” Jack muttered.

“That’ssss the norm, ffffor my ssssspeciesssss.” They hissed back in a matter-of-fact tone. Jack sighed. 

“It’s not the norm here… I’m the odd one out. I don’t like all that noise either.” He let his shoulders slump, gaze drifting down to the leaf-littered forest floor.

“Thisssss isss why I keep telling them we ssssshould make offffficial contact already!” They smacked one of their balled fists against their open palm for emphasis. Jack startled upright again. 

“Wait, them? There are more of you?” 

The snake-being quickly covered their mouth. “Ssssshouldn’t have sssaid all that…”

“Official contact? Do you have like your own government?” He paused, the gears in his alcohol-addled mind turning slowly but turning nonetheless. “Are you an alien or something?”

The other let out a sharp hiss, revealing that that Jack had hit the nail a little too on the head. They glared at him. 

“You’re pretty sssssmart for a human,” they paused, scratching a crest-like protrusion on the back of their head. 

“I’ll tell ya what. Ssssince I’m nice, and you’re a pretty good human, I’ll let you off eassssy and you can just go back to your weird crowded housssse. Jusssst promisssse you won’t tell anyone about thisssss, okay?” They started intently at him, waiting for a response, and despite the strange yellow color of their irises and the reptilian slit of their pupil, he felt some sense of acceptance and commonality. 

“Hah, no one would believe me anyways. A talking snake? They’d definitely think I’d drank too much or something.” He let out a sigh as he started to turn back towards his building, not looking forward to returning to the chaos of his dorm as the party was still ongoing. 

“Hey,” Jack jerked his head back around as the alien placed a hand on his shoulder, making a patting motion. “Hang in there, kid. It sssshould get better sssssoon. You’re not assss alone assss you think.”

Then, as soon as they’d appeared, the snake-being turned back around and slithered deeper into the woods with surprising speed, their brindled green scales blending in easily with the foliage until they were truly out of sight. Jack stared at the fluttering leaves, the only sign that someone else had been there. 

As he finally turned away, he felt something fall from his shoulder. It felt smooth and heavy. Uncertain what it had been, he crouched down and searched around in the leaves for several minutes, getting more and more annoyed by the low light as he felt around and imagined what creepy crawling things he might accidentally brush against. Finally, he felt the object that had fallen: smooth, cool, seemingly stone. He picked it up and carried it out of the woods, towards the sidewalk where there would be more visibility.

It was indeed a smooth, stone-like disk, but perfectly symmetrical enough for him to know it wasn’t just an odd pebble. It was barely larger than a coin, and he held it closer to his face to inspect, a blue circle of light pulsed around the edges. His eyes widened and he looked back at the woods, still curious, but knew better than to test the patience of beings he didn’t understand. So he shoved the disc in his pocked and trudged back to his dorm, busy now cementing the memory of strange scales on a human-like face in his mind instead of worrying about not being the life of the party.


	3. Launch Anxiety

“T-minus 15 seconds till liftoff.”

Dr. Quinton McDonough felt his stomach twist a bit. He swallowed and clenched his jaw. He was excited, not nervous; this moment was the culmination of everything he’d worked towards his entire life. Well, almost everything.

“…eleven, ten, nine…”

He glanced to left as much as he could with his entire torso strapped securely to his chair and neck supports coming halfway up around his head. He glanced first at his commander’s face, searching for any traces of fear, then let his eyes trail over to glare at the name “Mehta” sewed into the uniform. I’m not looking to him for reassurance or anything, McDonough told himself. I just have to know how I’ll look sitting in the commander’s chair next mission. 

“… five, four, three…” 

The ship started vibrating violently, so McDonough turned his head back so it was facing upwards again, as they were all strapped in facing the sky. Or, rather, the front of the cockpit. Either way, McDonough was too busy brooding about how he’d wanted to command this mission to think about it. Dr. Mehta, however, had won the position due to his time in the armed forces and his seniority. But, McDonough had at least ten more papers published than him!

“…two, one…” 

The rockets boomed louder, almost too loud for McDonough to hear the word “liftoff” through his headset. The ship shifted again, and then began to accelerate upwards, slowly at first, then gaining speed faster and faster as McDonough felt himself pushed back into his seat. His mind went blank as the force on his body increased until it was the most intense thing he’d ever felt, the metal around him shaking more violently than he’d expected, and worry starting to grow in his mind if something had gone wrong, and then … slowing. Something like deceleration. A floating feeling. 

Dr. Bluford, who was sitting far enough forward of Mehta and McDonough to work the controls, said something about navigation over the comms that McDonough was pretty sure was just directed at the commander, because now McDonough himself was staring out the tiny circle window to his right. His jaw dropped open as he registered what he was seeing: the stars spread out across the void, and earth in the corner, still big in the window but getting smaller by the second, and they were all brighter and more vivid than he could’ve ever imagined. In that moment, he was five years old again, watching the shuttle launches on TV and telling his mom that that was going to be him some day going to space, and her telling him that he better study hard then, and him promising her he would. He did. He graduated one year early from high school, got his undergraduate degree two years early and completed his Ph.D. faster than anyone before him at his university had. In that moment, he knew he was one of lucky few, that it didn’t matter what rank he was in the ship or if he was the best or the bravest. He’d reached for the stars and now he was here, sailing among them in heaven, flying past the moon, and that was all he’d really ever wanted. 

“Hey, uh, guys?” A voice cut through his reverie, and McDonough finally snapped back to attention, glancing around to make sure no one noticed his lapse in focus. Nobody seemed to be looking at him, as they were all listening to Amelia Wright, who’d unfastened her harness-seatbelt and was half-perched, half-floating in her chair, turned around to look at everyone as she spoke. 

“I was watching the ship cameras and stuff cause, well, just to make sure we’re on course and not cause space is amazingly gorgeous now that we’re up here or anything;” she gave them one of her winning grins, the kind that made her popular with all her co-workers back on Earth. “Anyways, I noticed it looks kind of weird here? Different from the rest of space?” She tapped a section of the display on her screen, making it zoom in on the area in question.

“Different how, Amelia?” Commander Mehta asked. Amelia was the sole member of the crew who had vocally expressed her dislike for the formality and titles typically used by astronauts. She’d told them a story after a particularly exhausting training session of how she’d expressed this same sentiment during her time in the Air Force and had gotten severely reprimanded for it. It was the only mar on her otherwise spotless service record. But she’d said that she trusted them, and she reasoned they had a bit more of an excuse to be comfortable with one another if they were going to spend a year and a half together on a Mars mission. So, everyone called Amelia by her first name per her request, but nobody else had stepped up to request the same for themselves yet. 

“It’s like, more shimmery or something. Or like the dimensions are off. It’s hard to describe, come see!”

The crew all unfastened their harnesses and floated forward to crowd around the screen. Nova Johnson, the one member of the crew who’d remained stoic and silent the entire trip thus far, reached their hand forward to outline a middle section of the image with their finger. 

“You mean right here?” they asked. Amelia nodded.

“I think I see it. You’re right, something seems weird, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Whatever it is, it’s right in our path, though,” Johnson concluded. McDonough squinted at the screen, trying to see what the two of them were talking about. Something did seem off, but he couldn’t attribute it to any one quality. 

“I mean, stars are supposed to shimmer. You know, nuclear fusion and all that.” He was saying it more to comfort himself than anything else. It elicited a scoff from Amelia, and a muffled chuckle from Johnson. 

“Dr. Bluford, is anything out of the ordinary showing up on our other displays?” Commander Mehta asked, pulling everyone back into focus.   
Bluford, who had already sat back down in her chair, nodded and began pulling figures from the ship’s various sensory instruments. In a couple of seconds, she had infrared readings and three different graphs and two other models pulled up on the screen. She scanned them all with an expert eye, then turned back to Mehta and shook her head. 

“Nothing out of the ordinary, sir.”

“Okay, thank you,” Mehta said with a nod of his head. Taking a deep breath, he pressed a button on the side of his headset to connect to the control team back on Earth.

“Houston, are all your readings showing up normal?” The whole crew waited in silence for the answer to Mehta’s question. A few keys clicked on the other end of the line.

“Everything’s showing up normal from down here, Commander. Is something wrong?”

“I –“ Mehta paused, looking at Amelia with some hint of apology in his eyes, not sure how to explain but not wanting to discount her hunch. 

In the end, he didn’t have to do either, because in that second the ship lurched forward, and space started to distort and shimmer more and more in front of them. The readings Bluford had pulled up on the screen, steady and silent a moment before, began to fluctuate wildly as the ship’s various alarms sounded slightly off – beat from each other in a cacophony of danger. 

“Okay, there’s definitely something happening with the readings now!” Bluford yelled over the noise. Commander Mehta pushed himself forward from the back of the cockpit, where momentum had pushed him a second before. He grabbed onto the back of his chair as he passed it to keep going, settling finally in front of the display next to Bluford. Meanwhile, Johnson had caught McDonough and Amelia by an arm each and was pulling them back to their seats. 

“Houston, are you seeing this?” 

“Seeing what, commande- oh shit, what’s that Randy?” The control team cut out for a moment as they started bickering among themselves, with more alarms sounding in the background over the comms. 

Now, the ship lurched forward in another bout of random acceleration, and the tiny points of light that were stars began to multiply and swirl around them, blurring together. 

“EVERYBODY HOLD ONTO YOUR SEATS!” The Commander bellowed. 

The swirls of light faded to black in the center, the deep black that wasn’t just the kind you’d see on Earth but the complete absence of light, the void in its purest form. Then, in a motion both as simple and as violent as a cork popping out of a wine bottle, they were pulled through the darkness and back into space. 

The ship’s engines sputtered for a second and died. The silence was broken first by Amelia and Bluford fumbling about the control panel and dark display-screen, mumbling to each other about what might have went wrong. 

But Dr. Quinton McDonough barely heard any of that. He was floating towards that little window to the right of his seat again, gazing out into the heavens like before. 

Only, this time, there was no Earth in the corner. There was no moon behind them. None of the familiar constellations greeted his searching eyes, desperate like his five year old self was desperate to reach for the stars. 

Now, all he saw were unfamiliar points of light. He was terrified.


End file.
